Office 365 Updates: June 2019

AMT’s Monthly Office 365 Updates keep you up to date with new features and important announcements from Microsoft. Office 365 has a continuous roll-out of changes. We filter out the announcements that we think will be most relevant to our customers and send them out in an easily digestible form. Here are the Office 365 June updates.

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Office 365

New Feature: Password Protected Anyone Links

When users share documents via links that work for Anyone, they can now require recipients to enter a custom password as well. Users who don’t have the password will be unable to use the sharing link to access content. Note that for maximum security, the password should be communicated separately from the sharing link itself.

New Feature: Supervision policies in Microsoft 365 now includes Skype for Business online chat and email exclusions

Microsoft are expanding Supervision policies beyond email and Teams content to include Skype for Business online chat monitoring. In addition, Supervision policies can now exclude specific email address so that automated notices or newsletters are not included in the review.

New Feature: New Yammer files in Office 365 groups will be stored in SharePoint

With this functionality, all new files posted in connected Yammer groups will now be stored in SharePoint. Existing files, files in unconnected groups, and files in private message will not be impacted by this change and will continue to be stored in the legacy location.

The roll out began in mid-June and is expected to be completed worldwide by end of July 2019.

New Feature: SharePoint and Teams: folder in site visibly connected to channel

Once available it will be easier to tell which folders within your library have an associated Teams channel. That means the chat capability associated to it is visible and actionable right from within the SharePoint user interface. SharePoint also helps users understand that some actions, like delete or rename of a channel-connected folder, need to happen through the Teams app.

Microsoft have started to gradually roll this out and will be completed worldwide by the end of August.

New Feature: Forms now supports ownership transfer of employees who have left an organisation

Global administrator now have a way to prevent data loss of Forms data, for employees who might have left the company or employee whose licenses are disabled, the change provides a way to transfer the ownership of their Forms data.

Feature Update: Support for data privacy communications in message centre

Message centre is being updated to support the communication of messages related to the privacy or security of the Microsoft 365 service to a restricted set of recipients. Once implemented, only the Global Admin and newly added Message centre Privacy Reader role will have access to these messages.

The new Privacy Reader role is available now. Starting July 26th, privacy/security communications in Message centre will only be available to the Global administrator or individuals assigned to the Privacy Reader role.

SharePoint

Updated Feature: SharePoint hubs limit raised to 2,000

After this change rolls out the number of SharePoint hubs will raise from 100 to 2000.

Microsoft have gradually rolled this out in mid-June, and the roll out will be completed worldwide by the end of July.

Digital assets can help you tell a more dynamic story. Organisation assets lets you register one or more document libraries via PowerShell as a special source for images, such as photos and logos, across all sites. Organisation assets libraries are available when you add images to the title region, page details thumbnail, or various web parts (image, image gallery, file viewer, hero, and quick links) from the “your organisation” tab.

Microsoft have started rolling this out to Targeted Release customers in late June and roll out worldwide by the end of August.

The Site Usage Page on SharePoint sites will have an improved user experience for “Unique Visitors” and “Site Visits” charts. There will be a new chart titled “Popular Platforms” where users can check the platform-type (Desktop, Mobile web, Mobile app, Tablet) from where traffic is coming to their SharePoint sites.

In order to see this change, go to the “gear” icon on a SharePoint site and then click “Site Usage”.

Teams

New Feature: Teams Priority Notifications

This feature allows a user to mark a chat message in Teams as “Urgent”. Unlike regular “important” messages, Urgent Messages (aka “priority notifications”) notify users repeatedly for a period of 20 minutes or until messages are picked up and read by the recipient, maximising the likelihood that the message is picked up and acted upon in a timely manner.

IT Admins can manage this feature as part of messaging policies in Teams. This feature is on by default for all tenants. However, due to configuration issues, in some cases, if an admin has created a TeamsMessagingPolicy in the last 6 months, this setting might have been defaulted to OFF. In that case, tenants admins will have to set it back to ON explicitly.

Users in hybrid tenants who are not in Azure Active Directory will soon be able to sign-up for Teams using their organisational email address, which in turn will create an AAD identity and enable them to use Teams. Microsoft will be rolling this out to customers starting in the end of June 2019,

This will only affect you if you have guest access enabled for your organisation. Guest users will now receive an updated welcome email when invited to Office 365 groups. They will be able to see your organisation’s privacy policy link, group SharePoint site & OneNote.

This change honors existing settings and controls.

Roll out will be completed to all customers worldwide by the end of July.

Yammer

Updated Feature: Yammer Push Notifications

There will be no visible change for users during the roll out period. Nor will users see any change after rollout as long as they are using the latest Yammer iOS or Android app. If they are using older versions after the roll-out, they will see a degraded notification when they would have seen a message before. The notification will read: “You’ve got a new notification. To view, please update the Yammer app or open Yammer”

Microsoft will gradually roll this out to customers in early-July, and the roll out will be completed worldwide by mid-August.

Outlook

New Feature: Outlook on the web – calendar quick compose

With this change, when users click on the calendar surface to use the quick compose form they will now be able to “add attendees” to that event and send an invite.

Microsoft have gradually rolled this out to Targeted Release customers in early June, and the roll out will be completed worldwide by the end of this month.